africajam

Every year rightmove uses statistics about how much time people spend on their website to justify raising prices.

Sellers, buyers and agents end up paying for the "htm" (hidden toll machine) that is rightmove.

The more we can chip away at the time people spend on rightmove the better chance we have a challenging the "htm".

Instead of sharing the link to rightmove with your spouse, friend etc remove the "htm" and share the rigove link instead.

Similar principle to how xcancel drives traffic away from the empire of Musk.

Ha ha, nice.

Annoying though that rightmove have become seen now as synonymous with house hunting in the UK. They are massively abusing that position and there is a £1.5bn claim against them in the courts right now.

I really hope they lose that claim but in the mean time I am doing my bit to try to get traffic back to estate agents from rightmove.

If you take out "htm" from the domain name while browsing a rightmove listing it will take you to a page where you can (in some instances) find a link to the same property on the estate agent's site.

The success of rigove will depend on getting a snowball effect going and right now I'm doing everything I can to build on the initial momentum.

I'm genuinely curious - are you saying this because you know quite a bit about trademark violation?

I put my flat in the UK on the market recently and it has given me a lot of insights into how broken the real estate market is! One thing I found particularly annoying is how dominant rightmove is and how much of the traffic for house hunting they control.

As a small way of standing up to them I created https://rigove.co.uk/ (rightmove without htm - the hidden toll machine ;)

If you change rightmove to rigove while browsing a property for sale you get a page which shows where else that property is listed.

It is only a few days old so it is currently more miss than hit but I plan to reach out to estate agents to increase coverage as quick as I can.

Yes, I have fond memories of hanging out in their offices above beta house. Amazingly welcoming bunch of people and one of the best things about the Berlin tech scene for me. Hope it works out well for them. I know they were never in it for the money but they deserve a decent payout for their years of commitment.

Nice tool - what tech stack are you using?

I built this with Ruby on Rails and would love to see people using it for projects like what you've done:

https://github.com/etewiah/property_web_builder

If you are interested in adapting it for your use case let me know and I'll do my best to help.

Introduce yourself here:

https://talk.birmingham.io/

Its a very friendly bunch of geeks - someone there might be able to help. There is a fair amount of tech activity in Birmingham so you could get lucky. Good luck.

Its a great idea but as someone pointed out, it seems more like a feature than a full product. You would also benefit from targeting a specific market.

I create a website builder for the real estate sector and I started off by open sourcing it:

https://github.com/etewiah/property_web_builder

This gave me some credibility in the sector and I have now been contacted by many people wanting help with their website.

I want to launch a SaaS that focuses on the real estate sector so if you are open to collaborating I'll be happy to discuss that.

Very well presented website - I like it a lot.

Would be interesting to see some reports about the real estate plugins available for Wordpress. I did a quick review myself and did not find any really high quality plugins but would be good to see some more detailed analysis.

This is a short article I wrote about real estate plugins in WordPress:

https://smallbusinessforum.co/why-an-alternative-to-wordpres...

Yeah, I hope its something like that because if he actually thinks the commit is a good idea then he really is taking the piss.

I got this pull request today and it really makes me wonder if U shouldn't just close down my open source project. For me its the equivalent of someone sticking a finger up at me after eating the free lunch I just gave them.....

Not an abandoned project but I really could do with some help on this open source website builder for the real estate sector:

https://github.com/etewiah/property_web_builder

For anyone looking to build a product that relies on aggregating real estate data I've built an open source web scraper specifically for real estate:

https://github.com/RealEstateWebTools/property_web_scraper

If you decide to open source your project, please share the link here. Thanks

Nice, thanks for sharing! I built a simple scraper and I need to add background processing etc:

https://github.com/RealEstateWebTools/property_web_scraper

Will dig into your code to see what I can learn.

Hi there, a sector in which web scraping is quite important is real estate. I have written an open source scraper for that sector (using Nokogiri and Ruby on Rails):

https://github.com/RealEstateWebTools/property_web_scraper

Take a look and let me know what you think. I have a few ideas about how to monetize. Get in touch if this is something you would like to work with me on ( ed at propertywebbuilder.com )

Would alway appreciate some help with this:

https://github.com/etewiah/property_web_builder

It is an open source real estate website builder

I'm hoping so though from where I am now it looks like it will be a long road ahead ;)

https://opencollective.com/property_web_builder

This project started as a way to import listings into an open source website builder I created.

Right now it effectively scrapes single pages that the user provides. It won't be too hard to enable crawling so that from one page it discovers others and scrapes those too.

Will be interesting to hear if anyone has some ideas about how I could monetise it in the longer term.

Listening to classical music really helps me. It took a while for it to make a difference but now it has become my way of signalling to my brain that its time to concentrate.

I signed up with opencollective some weeks ago and yesterday got my first backer: https://opencollective.com/property_web_builder . Only $2 a month but it still cheered me up. Fingers crossed it gains some momentum over the coming months. It is a good concept well implemented.

I've created an open source project for scraping real estate sites: https://github.com/RealEstateWebTools/property_web_scraper

You could use it to save people the trouble of filling out all the details for their property - they just provide the url for the property on a portal site that is supported and you import the details from there.

SEEKING FREELANCER | Madrid, Spain | REMOTE PropertyWebBuilder is an open source real estate website builder. A few users are interested in a mobile app client and I am looking for someone who can create an iOS client for it. Looking to have it ready early next year so plenty of time to work on it part-time. Will prefer someone who is interested in the real estate space.

Website: http://propertywebbuilder.com

Think this is for you? Email work @ propertywebbuilder.com

I've built a real estate listings website from scratch using Ruby on Rails. It was harder than I expected but now I have a solid base from which I can build functionality quickly. The best part is that I open sourced it! Check it out and see if it can be useful for what you're working on:

https://github.com/etewiah/property_web_builder

Happy to help with any questions you might have.

I recently got offered $10,000 for my open source real estate website builder (PropertyWebBuilder) on condition I close down the project. Turned it down but still not entirely sure if it was the right decision.

This is awesome! I don't understand why this hasn't got more upvotes. I've just created a forum for my project:

https://gitq.com/etewiah/property_web_builder

Now time to get people talking about it ;)

I love discourse and learnt a hell of a lot from it! It did however lead me to using ember in my open source project ( https://github.com/etewiah/property_web_builder ) which I rather regret.....

I am really sad to hear this. Rubytoolbox is a great resource and it will be sad to lose it.

Wow, this really rocks. Funny to see this right now as I've been experimenting with web scraping for the real estate sector - a project that I've made available open source here:

https://github.com/RealEstateWebTools/property_web_scraper

One of the things I really would like to do would be to make a chrome extension to help people export data as they search for properties. Will look into this product as soon as I get the chance and provide some feedback.

Realtors have for the longest time seen other realtors as competitors. Its time they recognise that the true competition is from large sites like Redfin that will use tech to gain an advantage over them.

I realised this after several conversations with realtors about this open source project I've created to help them build decent websites:

https://github.com/etewiah/property_web_builder

Most of them figured if it was open source then any of their competitors could use it and be just as good as them. They would say this even if they recognised that my product would give them a better website than they currently had. Pretty strange way of thinking if you ask me....